Call for Proposals – The Details

We are inviting the Ruby community to submit talks for this year’s
eurucamp in Berlin. This Call for Proposals will close on 15 May.
Our CFP process is based on the process used at
JSConf EU 2012
.
When you’re ready to submit a proposal, visit our
CFP submission app
and login with your Twitter or GitHub credentials.

Topics

To get a feel for what we might be interested in hearing about, take a look at the programme for previous years (
2012
|
2011
).

eurucamp is a Ruby event. We are looking for Ruby topics or topics
that would interest Rubyists.

Rails talks are welcome, but we are framework agnostic.

We also accept non-talk proposals, like workshops and moderated
discussions. You can select your format in the CFP Process.

We Can Help

Not everybody is a natural talent on stage. Not everybody can produce kick-ass slide-decks. Not everybody is a live-demo-god. Not everybody knows they have something great to talk about.

There are about a million reasons why you don’t consider yourself a speaker, let alone at eurucamp, where all your heroes have spoken in the past. We are here to prove you wrong. If all you have is a gut feeling that you should be on stage, we are here to reach out and help you to develop or hone the skills you think you lack to deliver a great presentation.

We are happy to brainstorm your interests to see if a great topic is hiding.

We are happy to connect you with experienced speakers to help prepare your submission, or you can refer to the Example Submission section below for tips.

We are happy to review and advise on how to produce a slide deck.

If you need practice giving talks, get in touch, we can hook you up with local groups or set up a stage for you and a bunch of friends in advance, so you can practice in front of a friendly crowd.

If you need more encouragement, check out the following site from Tiffany Conroy,
We Are All Awesome
that tries to convince you to speak.

The Perks

If you get selected as a speaker at eurucamp, here’s what you get:

Entrance to the conference. We won’t be done with the speaker selections by the end of the ticket sales, so if you want to make sure you can attend, you may want to purchase a ticket regardless. If you get selected to speak and if you need to, we can refund your ticket, but if we don’t, we can spend more money on making the conference more awesome.

If your employer can cover your travel and hotel, we are happy to list them as a company sponsor.

If you need travel information or would like to stay with fellow Rubyists, get in touch with us, we can help you out!

The Selection Process

If you get selected as a speaker at eurucamp, here’s what you get:

Anonymise submissions, so we don’t bias against anything related to the submitter.

Two rounds of voting:

The first round rates each talk on a scale from 1 to 10.

The top-N (~50) submissions are rated again on a 3-point scale (“meh”, “yay”, “MUST HAVE”).

De-anonymise so we can (finally) bias against speaker details (e.g. to find a mix if seasoned and new speakers). We do want new speakers on the conference, so don't fear losing out to "the pros" in the last minute.
If you need travel information or would like to stay with fellow Rubyists, get in touch with us, we can help you out!

We expect more submissions than speaking slots. The process helps us to select the right ones.

Example Submission

Here’s a proposal that we accepted in 2012:

How To Be Better

A lot of the principles of clean code are forgotten when writing documentation.

Have a single source of truth and don't repeat yourself. Avoid writing brittle code. Use ubiquitous terminology and choose searchable names. Be consistent in your formatting. Test your code. Refactor and practice successive refinement. Don't write any more than you need to.

These principles of clean code can be applied with great effect to the production and maintenance of documentation, but there's more to it than that. Code needs to satisfy machines and coders. Documentation needs to satisfy people performing range of different tasks: from cursory inspection through to intensive development.

This talk will review relevant principles and examine real-world examples, leaving you with a practical mental checklist for writing documentation that will help your users and your software thrive.

Guidelines

Submit your proposal by 15 May, 23:59:59 CEST No excuses.

All talks are in English.

Talks are usually 15 or 30 minutes long (for longer talks we’d get in touch with you directly). That includes 3-5 minutes of Q&A. We will be on a tight schedule and enforce the end of a talk rigorously. Please notify us in advance how long you want your slot to be. We suggest timing your presentation in advance.

Make sure you care and make sure we see you care. Typos, sloppy formatting and all-lowercase submissions make our reading of your proposal tedious. These things will definitely count against your proposal.

Don’t overdo it either. If you need more than two paragraphs to get to the point of your topic, we need to ask you to slim things down. With the amount of submissions we get, the quicker you can to make a good impression, the better.

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time” — Blaise Pascal

Original Topics. One of the things we like to do with eurucamp is to push the community forward. We can’t do this if the same people keep talking about the same things all the time. Thus, we favour original content. If you want to discuss a topic that you have talked about elsewhere, try to add a twist, or new research, or development, something unique. Of course, if your talk is plain awesome as-is, go for that :)

Misc

All talks will be recorded and published on the internet for free, along with a recording of the slide deck, live-demo or other on-presenter-screen activity.

We do this for the benefit of the larger Ruby community and those who can’t make it to the conference. We hope you want to help out, but if you are in any way uncomfortable in any way, let us know and we will work things out.

Finally, since you retain full ownership of your slides and recording, we’d like to ask you to make your materials and recording available under a creative commons (we default to no commercial reuse) or other open source license.